A friend of mine somewhat recently became a licensed realtor. One thing that surprised him was the lack of technology being used in his workplace. Though not a technologist himself, he enjoys an efficient workflow such as using a tablet and managing documents digitally. So whenever he’s asked to complete a transaction using piles of paper and copy machines and so forth, it obviously gets under his skin.

For the last several months we’ve been trying to find ways that I can use my various talents (finite though they may be) to make his work easier or even improve the chances he’ll be successful in a sale. We’ve had a few conversations and personally I’ve been brainstorming and keeping notes and scratching out ideas.

Some of the ideas I’ve had are more expensive and involved while others are more simple and can be done inexpensively. One more expensive and involved idea is shooting drone footage of lakeside homes to help differentiate the listing. I hope to get a chance to shoot some drone footage soon. (hire me?)

One idea that, thanks to Twilio, is very easy and inexpensive to do is writing a SMS autoresponder to send property information to a would-be-buyer. And since I’ve wanted an excuse to play with Twilio this was my chance.

Here is the idea; A buyer pulls up in front of a house that they may be interested in. In the front yard, the listing agency’s sign would have a phone number that the buyer could send a code to and get information about the property.

A phone number (you can purchase one from Twilio for $1/month or a short code for $1,000/month)

A server to host Three Toe

Let me just state right up front; using Twilio will cost money but it is very inexpensive. You get charged for each message received and each message sent. So in our example of a buyer texting a code and getting a response that is 1 round trip that costs just about a penny and a half (at current prices). A penny to send a home buyer a link to a beautiful web site of the home they want is a no-brainer.

Here is how Twilio works:

Potential buyer sends a text message to your Twilio-powered number

Twilio receives that text, creates a “POST” with general information about the sender (phone number, location, and contents of message, etc.)

Twilio then sends that information to your app via a “webhook”

Your app parses the response, and can do anything you want. In our case, we’re using Twilio to send a message back to the sender with information based on the code they sent

Theoretically you could use this simple service to do just about anything. You could ask for their email address and subscribe them to your newsletter. You could send back a YouTube video. You could keep a log of their phone number in a database and an agent could follow up with them at a later date. You could call the sender and read an audio message back to them with background music. Or, you could first call the agent in charge of the property and then call the sender back and connect the two together.

But I didn’t do any of that. All I wanted to do for this service was set up an easy way to allow my friend the realtor to create an auto response for the code the potential buyer sent.

Here is the app works:

Twilio sends a webhook POST and it is received by Three Toe.

Using the contents of the message (e.g. “T0001”) it looks in a “responses” directory for a TXT file with that same name.

If that TXT file is found, it responds to the sender with its contents.

If that TXT file is not found, it responds with something like “There is no information available for this property.”

Very, very simple.

To add a new “code” that the application will respond to my friend the realtor just needs to add a new TXT file to the “responses” directory. Or, alternatively, I plan on creating a very simple form that will allow him to list and edit the responses and add new ones.

I’m fully aware that there are thousands of open source versions of this same sort of thing. In fact, this is basically what Twilio would likely use as their example code for others to learn from. I made this simply to scratch our itch and to get familiar with the Twilio API. It was fun to hack around with.

Update on June 28th, 2016: I’ve tagged version 0.2.1 on Github which includes a new configuration area to make it dead simple to create, edit, and delete codes and responses.

Update on June 29th, 2016: I’ve tagged version 0.3.0 on Github which includes a Bootstrap-style theme for the configuration area. This makes it easy to update codes and responses on mobile devices.

I have a few planned features for Three Toe that I’ll likely be able to build as extensions. I’ve already sold three copies of this simple app (with slight modifications) and some of the features needed by those customers will be making their way back into the repo. Fun app to hack away on.